Increasing Social Initiations During Shared Book Reading: An Intervention for Preschoolers With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often delayed in acquiring social initiation skills utilized during common early childhood activities. A multiple probe design was utilized to assess the efficacy of a shared book reading intervention to increase the independent commenting of three young children with ASD. The intervention resulted in participant’s acquisition of social commenting in the form of independent pointing and verbal commenting to gain social attention from an adult. The results suggest that young children with ASD can independently initiate social interactions during shared book reading when these behaviors are systematically taught and reinforced. Implications for practice and directions for future research aimed toward generalization and improving the implementation of shared book reading interventions are discussed.

Least-to-Most Prompting in Teaching Social Interaction and Communication Skills to Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review

“…In general, gestural, verbal, model and physical prompts were included in the prompting hierarchy in the studies. However only two studies, conducted recently, included visual prompts (D'Agostino et al, 2018;Walsh et al2018). Moreover, independent prompt was used in nearly one out of three of the studies.…”

“…More than one-third of the studies (n = 15) collected social validity data through subjective evaluation mostly from teachers, parents and grad students (Alzrayer et al, 2019;Cannella-Mallone et al, 2010;D'agostino et al, 2018;Thiemann & Goldstein, 2004). Further, only one study collected the data from the participants themselves (Van Der Meer et al, 2013).…”

“…The studies determining one dependent variable targeted manding (Alzyrayer et al, 2017;Alzyrayer et al, 2019;Lund & Troha, 2008;Raulston et al, 2019;Roche et al, 2014;Schaefer-Whitby et al, 2019), asking questions (Huskens et al, 2013), play skills (Barton et al, 2019;Kourassanis et al, 2015;Quigley et al, 2018;Ülke-Kürkçüoğlu, 2015) receptive language (Curiel et al, 2016), joint attention (Hansen et al, 2018;Hansen et al, 2019), communicating through technology-aided instruction (Finke et al, 2017), social communication for job (Walsh et al, 2018) and initiating interaction (Charlop & Greenberg, 2009) skills. Nine studies targeted greeting and waving hands (Thiemann & Goldstein, 2004), manding and thanking (Waddington et al, 2014), play and communication skills (Barton, 2015;Barton et al, 2018), commenting and responding (D'Agostino et al, 2018), receptive language and manding (Ninci et al, 2018), initiating and elaborating interaction (Topuz & Ülke-Kürkçüoğlu, 2019). The studies determining three to five dependent variables targeted eye contact, toy sharing and initiating interaction (Tetreault & Lerman, 2010), manding, responding and commenting/greeting (Cannella-Malone et al, 2010;Xin & Leonard, 2015), asking question, changing the topic and labeling (Shillingsburg & Cariveau, 2016).…”

“…11 of these used only one prompt in any levels in the hierarchy (e.g., Huskens et al, 2013;Quigley et al, 2018;Topuz & Kürkçüoğlu, 2019;Wilson et al, 2017). However, the rest used two or more prompts in one or more levels (e.g., Barton, 2015;Barton et al, 2018;D'Agostino et al, 2018;Tetreault & Lerman, 2010).…”

Shared Interactive Book Reading Interventions for Young Children With Disabilities: A Systematic Review

“…Within the 13 SCED studies, child responses and/or initiations during book reading sessions were measured in eight studies (62%). Across these eight studies, there was variability in how these data were collected-from responses that were nonecholalic (Bellon et al, 2000) to social initiations and appropriate verbal responses (D'Agostino et al, 2020). Researchers in four studies (31%) measured vocabulary skills, most often book-related (near-transfer) words.…”